How To Install xdg-desktop-portal on Ubuntu

Posted on April 1, 2023 (Last modified on May 20, 2023 )

3 minutes • 450 words

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install xdg-desktop-portal on Ubuntu.

What is `xdg-desktop-portal`

xdg-desktop-portal is:

xdg-desktop-portal provides a portal frontend service for Flatpak, Snap, and possibly other desktop containment/sandboxing frameworks. This service is made available to the sandboxed application, and provides mediated D-Bus interfaces for file access, URI opening, printing and similar desktop integration features.

The implementation of these interfaces is expected to require user confirmation before responding to the sandboxed application’s requests. For example, when the sandboxed application ask to open a file, the portal implementation will open an “Open” dialog outside the sandbox, and will only make the selected file available to the sandboxed app if that dialog is confirmed.

xdg-desktop-portal is designed to be desktop-agnostic, and uses a desktop-environment-specific GUI backend such as xdg-desktop-portal-gtk to provide its functionality.

There are three methods to install xdg-desktop-portal on Ubuntu. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install xdg-desktop-portal Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install xdg-desktop-portal using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install xdg-desktop-portal

Install xdg-desktop-portal Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install xdg-desktop-portal using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install xdg-desktop-portal

Install xdg-desktop-portal Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Ubuntu. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install xdg-desktop-portal using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install xdg-desktop-portal

How To Uninstall xdg-desktop-portal on Ubuntu

To uninstall only the xdg-desktop-portal package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove xdg-desktop-portal

Uninstall xdg-desktop-portal And Its Dependencies

To uninstall xdg-desktop-portal and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Ubuntu, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove xdg-desktop-portal

Remove xdg-desktop-portal Configurations and Data

To remove xdg-desktop-portal configuration and data from Ubuntu we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge xdg-desktop-portal

Remove xdg-desktop-portal configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove xdg-desktop-portal configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge xdg-desktop-portal

Dependencies

xdg-desktop-portal have the following dependencies:

References

xdg-desktop-portal website

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install xdg-desktop-portal package on Ubuntu using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.